The overarching mission of the Emory PERRC is to support innovative research that generates knowledge to guide local, state, and federal public health leadership in creating and maintaining sustainable preparedness and emergency response systems. Our proposal includes five interdependent research projects (Public Health Systems Research on Preparedness;Incident Command and Emergency Operations Centers;Academic-Community Partnerships in Preparedness;Improving Disaster Planning for Nursing Home, Home Health and Dialysis Providers;Immunization Systems and Public Health Preparedness), a new investigator program involving doctoral students and fellows, and an innovative pilot project program. Collectively, we will examine the organizational characteristics (e.g., administration, structure, and workforce) of local and state public health systems for preparedness and emergency response, including emergency operations centers. We will also assess the response capacity and interoperability of immunization systems and registries, poison control centers, academic institutions, and healthcare providers for selected medically vulnerable populations. Supporting this research mission is an integrated data environment that will link research databases for cross-disciplinary collaboration and facilitate timely dissemination of results. The studies proposed are unique in the populations surveyed, their scale, their capacity to validate responses across organizations, and their integrated and multidisciplinary analyses. Such research can result in identifying best practices and capability assessments for preparedness and emergency response to improve performance of public health agencies across geographic areas and leverage assets from healthcare systems and academic institutions.
